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By Force Alone cover art

By Force Alone

By: Lavie Tidhar
Narrated by: Toby Longworth
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Summary

Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, but they don't know sh*t. There was never a painting that showed the true Britain, that clogged sewer Rome abandoned just as soon as it could. 

A Britain where petty warlords murdered each other in the mud, while all the while the Angles and Saxons and worst of all the Jutes, were coming over here and taking our lands and taking our jobs and taking our women. 

You want to know the truth? Are you sure you can handle the truth? Arthur? An over-promoted gangster, in thrall to that eldritch parasite, Merlin. Excalibur? A shady deal with a watery arms dealer. The Grail Quest? Have you no idea about the aliens and the radioactive blight? Well, you'd better listen to this then.

©2020 Lavie Tidhar (P)2020 W. F. Howes

Critic reviews

“Lavie Tidhar bears comparison with the best of Philip K. Dick” (Financial Times

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Excellent from start to finish

This was a delight. A retelling of the Arthurian legends with some fun twists. Its narrator is brilliant and conveys a range of voices with ease.

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Choose Life…and a bloody great axe.

A really interesting book in that it swings all over the place in tone before bringing you back to the idea of life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. A retelling of the King Arthur legends, it sits in post-Roman world with very modern sensibilities. The fantasy elements are dark and malevolent as in their original forms, the humour is very funny but can swing immediately to a scene of utter horror. I thought it was brilliant but I’ll need a bit of time before I read it again.

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1 person found this helpful